Now the Grammys is making streaming-only albums available for awards consideration. Chance, whose real name is Chancellor Bennett, could make history again if "Coloring Book" is nominated for an award.

Miraculously, Chance has done all of this without a label supporting him. He's turned down record deals from numerous labels, and depends on word-of-mouth and his Soundcloud account for distribution.

In July that year, Childish Gambino raised Chance's profile even more by featuring him as a guest on his song "They Don't Like Me."

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Chance instantly became a star with "Acid Rap."

Still label-free, Chance released "Acid Rap" in 2013. It got on a bunch of best-of-2013 lists and was downloaded more than a million times. The most popular song on the album on SoundCloud, "Favorite Song," features Childish Gambino.

But Chance didn't keep doing the same thing over and over again. He joined a band and made uplifting Christian rock.

In 2015, Chance joined a band called Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment for a quirky album called "Surf." The Social Experiment is a collective of Chicago-based musicians. The album is structured democratically: the artist names aren't included in the track titles, and different songs appeared on the SoundCloud accounts of different musicians instead of being collected together in one place. It would have never happened at a commercially driven record label.

More importantly, the music was a stylistic departure for Chance. His vocal performance was still rap, but it's not really a rap album. The whole thing takes a jazzy and explicitly Christian tone. The highlight is a track called "Sunday Candy." Chance co-directed the music video.

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Performing on "Saturday Night Live" was a career landmark.

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Chance performed "Sunday Candy" and "Paradise" from "Surf" on "Saturday Night Live" on December 15, 2015. He was the first unsigned artist to do so.

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Then he made five tracks with Kanye West.

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In 2014, Chance worked on five songs on Kanye West's 2016 album "The Life of Pablo." He provided guest vocals for "Ultralight Beam,"rapping "I met Kanye West, I'm never going to fail/He said let's do a good ass job with Chance three/I hear you gotta sell it to snatch the Grammy/Let's make it so free and the bars so hard/That there ain't one gosh darn part you can't tweet."

Like he's done for many other artists, Kanye raised Chance's profile — and gave him the liberty to continue without a record label backing him. Chance made a second appearance on "SNL," performing "Ultralight Beam" with Kanye on the night "The Life of Pablo" dropped.

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With "Coloring Book," he rapped about how much he hates record labels.

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In May, Chance released "Coloring Book" on various streaming platforms. Kanye appears on the upbeat opening track, "All We Got," and Lil Wayne, T-Pain, Justin Bieber, and Future drop verses on other songs on the album. An artist signed with a record label would never be able to release an album like this for free, but Chance did.

He also might snatch the Grammy.

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Now that he's BFFs with Kanye and "Coloring Book" is a success, the music industry has to accept Chance whether they want to or not. The Grammys changed its rules to make streaming-only albums eligible. Chance the Rapper is only 23, and he's running out of barriers to break.